Floating Offshore Wind

Installation of floating offshore wind turbine in Fukushima...

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First ever offshore wind farm in Western Japan goes for a test drive

2013-08-01

On June 27th, the Japanese New Energy & Industrial Technology Organisation, or NEDO for short, in cooperation with the Electric Power Development Company (also known as J-POWER), announced the commencement of test demonstrations of their new offshore wind farm (Fixed-bottom type, 2MW output) based 1.4 km off the coast of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture.

NEDO will send the generated power back to mainland Japan whilst aiming to establish the necessary technology, such as that to maintain the wind turbines as sources of reliable and sustainable energy, and enable the spread of offshore wind farms.

In its efforts to pave the way for wind energy, NEDO has already constructed one more offshore wind farm close the coast of Choshi, Chiba Prefecture, in the Pacific, making the Kitakyushu offshore wind farm the second of its kind, but the first to be constructed on the Eastern seaboard of Japan. The new wind farm also differs in the fact that it utilises Hybrid technology in its fundamental components, unlike the facilities in Chiba.

For research purposes a monitoring tower, the first in Japan, was constructed nearby in July 2012 near too the Kitakyushu test site and began recording wind speed and direction in October of the same year.

According to a Fuji Economics survey, the value of the domestic market for wind energy stood at 50 million yen in 2012 but is predicted to quickly rise to 6.1 billion yen by 2016, and 76.7 billion yen by 2020. In recent years Europe has been considered the World leader in wind energy, but with a wide exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster lingering in the memories of many, demand for wind energy in Japan is expected to rise also.